We bring an update to the demo of The Guild - Europa 1410, with additions and fixes alike.

The most notable addition is a new map named Herle, part of the duchy of Brabant. In 1410, Herle was a fortified church; today it is part of the Dutch city of Heerlen. Herle is a small and cozy settlement, and it serves as a tutorial map to help onboard new players, together with tutorial goals to guide newcomers to The Guild.

A birds-eye view of Herle

In addition to this new map, the most important additions of this update are:

Tutorial tasks

If you play the game on our new tutorial map of Herle, you will get small tasks that make it easier for you to find your bearings and get a good understanding of the game. Herle is a small map, designed to keep you focused on the essentials of the game.

A new filtering system for highlighting buildings

You can now select what is highlighted by the building overlay and choose to filter by your buildings, all profession buildings, all city-owned or private structures, residences or resource sites such as mines or woodland areas.

New and tweaked animations to reflect the activities of workers

Workers are now visibly working on their tasks, and every task has been assigned a set of animations.

This is a first iteration; we will continue to improve and add more animations for tasks and activities in future updates.

We wanted to address the most-mentioned feedback from the community so far with this update, so we focused on adding an improved onboarding experience with Herle, building outlines and highlight tweaks to be less meddlesome, as well as a new system for animations to reflect worker activities.

We're excited for you to jump into our demo update! Give it a try here: https://thqn.net/tge-demo-steam

In case you experience any issues or encounter any bugs, we would appreciate it if you could report them using the following link: https://bugreporting.thqnordic.com/#/projects/197/the-guild-europa-1410/add-issue

Of course, the update includes many more improvements, tweaks and fixes. You can find the detailed changelog below:

• Added: New tutorial Map “Herle”

• Added: Tutorial missions (only available on Herle)

• Added: Worker state machine states for work-life cycle, unemployed, and go-to-house

• Added: You can now batch assign idle workers and unassign workers to tasks and crafting goods

• Added: You can now assign workers to repeat certain tasks

• Added: "Sign Up for Public Service” now influences Unrest

• Tweaked: You can now unassign workers while they are working on an ongoing task (such as gathering ingredients), but doing so while they are in the middle of the task will cause you to lose progress on that task

• Tweaked: Accident Chance is now measured per 120 minutes

• Tweaked: Storage slots in sheds increased from 2/3/4 to 4/6/8

• Tweaked: Effect of “Accident Protection” improvement from +10/+20/+30 to +5/+10/+15

• Tweaked: Burglary protection decreases based on crime level (-4/-8/-12)

• Tweaked: Chance for catching the queen bee reduced

• Tweaked: Starting crime rate in quarters increased

• Tweaked: Increased AP cost of skill training

• Tweaked: Lowered starting taxes

• Tweaked: Lowered cost of waylaying carts

• Tweaked: AI and its actions based on economics:

  • AI is now less likely to place items in their storefront, and is more likely to sell by using carts

  • AI is slightly more likely to attack carts

  • AI will be a bit more patient when sending carts to buy ingredients

  • AI is less likely to leave office positions

• Tweaked: Duels now start immediately after the challenge is accepted

• Fixed: “Socialize at inn” now improves opinion with people

• Fixed: Beehives generated too much revenue

• Fixed: Constructed buildings were not shown after loading a savegame

• Fixed: Duels were not loaded properly when loading a save that was made after the duel has begun

• Fixed: Victory conditions and challenges were not passed on to the heir

• Fixed: Training Bonus 2 did not require having Training Bonus 1

• Fixed: Business improvements relating to gathering ingredients now work properly

• Added: Worker animations now reflect their current task

• Added: Additional work stations for workers in buildings

• Added: Building interior entrance point for character animations depicting arrival

• Added: Logic for character animations relating to walking in/out

• Added: Smoke effect for chimneys

• Added: Light beams and dust visuals to various interiors to improve ambience

• Added: More character portraits

• Added: Color variants for characters

• Added: Flowerbed visuals in the Alchemist’s business

• Tweaked: Grass colors depending on the season

• Tweaked: Slightly improved snow visuals

• Tweaked: Character visuals optimization

• Tweaked: Occlusion settings for some ambience and foley sounds

• Tweaked: St. Barbara’s Church for visual improvement

• Tweaked: Interior glowing glass material to be more atmospheric

• Tweaked: Decreased visual effects when quarter values change

• Fixed: A-posing characters

• Fixed: Building highlights, crests, and building icons in the city are visible in dioramas

• Fixed: Missing textures in the backdrop of building interiors

• Fixed: Snow on items located indoors in interiors

• Added: Fisherman splash sounds

• Added: Stillwater sounds

• Added: New songbirds audio

• Added: Voiceovers for various events and circumstances:

  • Ranking up in profession

  • Worker promotion

  • Worker low in energy

  • Selecting workers for hiring

  • Unassigning a worker from a task

  • Clicking on a worker for the purpose of dragging and dropping them

  • Start voting in an election

  • Start of spying

  • End of spying

  • Evidence gained from spying

  • A building upgrade is ready

• Tweaked: Insect sounds

• Tweaked: Hammering sounds in the Innkeeper’s business

• Tweaked: UI sounds rebalanced

• Tweaked: Rain sounds are now quieter

• Tweaked: Area around the city walls is now quieter

• Fixed: Background music stops after creating and loading a save inside an interior

• Added: New button to set filter for building highlight overlay

• Added: UI for setting tasks to be automatically repeated by workers in the business management window

• Added: Borders for family crests based on rank

• Added: Dynasty rank now visible in the Family Tree

• Added: Dynasty wealth now visible in the Family Tree

• Added: Dynasty renown now visible in the Family Tree

• Added: Number of dynasty members now visible in the Family Tree

• Added: Background color behind the words illegal/legal in law tooltips based on the act’s legality

• Added: “Unguarded Cart” tooltip and warning sign on “Send” button for a cart that does not have an escort

• Added: Names for carts instead of numbers

• Added: Visual effect when minimizing windows in certain situations to explain how to re-open the window

  • Ongoing event button for elections and trials when minimized

  • Event button when event is minimized

  • City Archives button when tutorial prompts are closed

  • Planned event list button when a new event of important priority is added

• Added: Warning that items cannot be moved from the character’s inventory to other places, such as selling in the Marketplace, or moving from the character’s inventory to carts

• Tweaked: Cart windows' positioning to prevent obstruction of other elements

• Tweaked: Size of the tooltip area for District and Quarter in the City Overview menu to be larger

• Tweaked: Carts in the city do not need to be clicked anymore to view information; hovering over the cart will show details of the cart’s owner, items inside, and destination

• Tweaked: Background colors for icons relating to various status effects

• Tweaked: Progress bars in events made more visible

• Tweaked: Background appearance for planned events to reflect whether an event happened in the past, is in progress, or will happen in the future

• Tweaked: Tooltips for top HUD buttons adjusted so that the cursor does not cover them upon hovering

• Tweaked: Position of element showing the remaining turns to not overlap with the reset camera button

• Tweaked: Adjusted the position of the cart’s integrity so that cart names fit better

• Tweaked: UI layout for “Improve Skill” menu

• Tweaked: Law names now break into a new line instead of scaling down in size to maintain readability

• Fixed: Upcoming Events window causes keyboard input not being registered

• Added: Double-click to enter interiors

• Added: Right-click to exit interiors

• Tweaked: “Camera Parallax” effect disabled by default

• Added: Tutorial texts to the City Archives under the “Tutorial” section for posterity

• Tweaked: Text for Crime status effects

• Tweaked: Sturdiness text from integrity to maximum integrity

• Tweaked: Description of Sacred Scent to reflect that it gives +1 Action Point

• Tweaked: Renamed the chevron icon under a building’s name from “Upgrade” to “Upgrades” to denote that it will show a list of upgrades implemented in the building

• Tweaked: “Cheaper Repairs” building improvement description now indicates that it lowers repair costs by 10% instead of 5%

• Tweaked: Bed and Portal improvement descriptions so they specify the exact type of energy regeneration based on the energy tooltip, whether it is per turn or per hour

• Tweaked: Quarter status effect names changed from Poorly Maintained, In Disrepair, and Declared Ruinous to Unkempt Streets, Filthy Streets, and Crumbling Streets

• Tweaked: Adornments improvement text to say it increases opinion with citizens only, instead of citizens and workers

• Fixed: Descriptions for Pillory, Fountain, and Well for the city upgrades were not updating after completing the upgrade

• Fixed: Jan Žižka tooltip text

• There may be delays in notifications for completing goals

• When unassigning workers while they work on an ongoing task (such as gathering ingredients), you may lose progress on that task

• Previous saves are not compatible with the demo update - please start a new game

• Double-clicking to enter a building might not work reliably on rare occasions

Greetings!

And we're back, with even more!

To access this beta patch, you must opt‑in to the Beta branch by navigating to Steam Library > The Guild 2: Renaissance > Properties > Game Versions & Betas > patch_4.6.

For this release, the version shown on the main menu is "4.696".

Remember to start the game with the launcher to update your mods. As always, we made sure to update "Reforged (Official)" with the latest changes so please hit "SYNC" in the launcher to apply the new changes.

• AIs are now able to build outside of city building areas when no free spot could be found in building areas, thus allowing a proper expansion and allowing for the economy to continue growing better.

• Buildings built outside of cities now generate a dirt road connecting to the main network of roads, in order to improve pathfinding as characters follow roads natively.

• Added a new setting to the game launcher to load higher resolution textures for certain 2D interface elements, a new solution in the makings to make the game look better on higher UI Scaling. Note: You can hit Shift + F2 in game to switch between higher resolution textures and regular textures.

• Higher Resolution textures take priority over the same textures that exist in the atlas texture files on disk, in the hires folder.

• Made character render views render at a higher resolution, thus providing a less pixelated look of the 3D views of characters.

• Improved Font System for less blurry and pixelated fonts on higher UI Scaling options.

• When HQ Portraits is activated in the game's launcher settings, made the game safely fall back to non HQ Portraits when an issue is being detected (rare bug), thus improving game stability. In the past, when HQ Portraits would fail for whichever reason, it would spam the logs and attempt to load it back every frame, thus causing massive performance issues.

• The game now automatically assembles the mouse icons based on the button textures associated with it rather than loading separate textures. For example, when you use the measure "Court Someone", the mouse icon changes to reflect the action currently being engaged with the "Court Someone" texture showing in the middle of a circle texture. This means that all actions that let you select a target now assemble this texture automatically, and it fixes issues with certain actions not having pre-made textures for these.

• Fixed an issue with the Crime Sight feature where only one ring of detection would show at a time.

• Added a new type of multiplayer ping: When selecting a ping, hitting the "CTRL" key on your keyboard allows you to place down a ping surrounded by a circle on the ground. You can edit the size of the ring by moving the mouse. Then, release "CTRL" to place down the ping with the circle. The circle is animated with a pulsing effect.

• The AI will now focus more on courting.

• Improved Chinese font.

• AI Thugs (Myrmidons) will no longer try to run the measure "Assign to Residence".

• Improved Chinese localization (https://five.seafn.eu.org/id/BlackPainkiller).

How is your experience so far?

We hope you enjoy The Guild 2: Renaissance with us! As actual players, we make sure to test the game thoroughly in Multiplayer before each update. Of course, The Guild 2: Renaissance is an old game, and there will always be more to do, but rest assured that we are committed to continuing this way and provide support and more features.

Next, we'd like to update the Manage Building AI logic to make it easier to use and add a Priority System and fix a few remaining issues with it.

Soon, we will also move on to a more thorough investigation of how AI plays, so expect some adjustments linked to this and possibly economy-related matters. As it stands out right now, the new economy systems are working, but the main problem one can experience during their session is a lack of workshops of certain type(s) which leads to shortage of different goods. Effectively, a workshop can only produce so much to meet the demands of a town, so we will be looking at solutions for this. Now that AIs are able to construct outside of settlements though, you may see more goods being produced, since it opens up more room for production. We would also like to remind you that AI workshops will also sell goods directly at their workshop sell storage, so make sure to visit them regularly to find what you're looking for!

Have a great Sunday!